Writing the Uncomfortable, or How to Fuck Up Your Characters with Tabitha Bast

People eh? You think you know what they’re about but then….boom! Absolutely unhinged behaviour.

You want your characters to be plausible and consistent but you also want them to be real. And irl people often act in surprising ways.

In this workshop we will explore how to mess with your protagonists, bringing a whiff of nasty to your nice ones and an annoyingly sympathetic reading to your villains. You may not like anybody better but your readers will want to read more and you – you! – will want to keep on writing them!

The problem with straightforward people is that they are often, quite frankly, a little dull. Bringing some nuance, some za za zoom, some fucked upness helps them round out and become more relatable. But doing it in a way that adds meaning rather than confusion is a little trickier.

We’ll explore:

• How to use your character’s hidden agendas to deepen and complexify them
• Cognitive dissonance – what it is and bringing it into play on the page
• Creating external and internal tensions to test and tempt your protagonists